The NIH Catalyst
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Fostering Communication and Collaboration The nihCatalystA Publication for NMH Inira mural Scientists Institutes of Healthb Office of the Dieectorb Volume 6 Issue 5 National , m Septembfr-October 1998 A Rocky Mountain The Last Best Place eor Research: Science Sampler NIAID ’s Big Sky Laboratory by Celia Hooper Bruce Chesebro, who heads the Laboratory of Persistent Viral Dis- magine living in Shangri-La—a shim- eases (LPVD), has a three-ring re- mering, legendary trout-stream river search focus: on the immunology of I valley poised between two spectacu- mouse Friend leukemia retrovirus, lar mountain ranges that make the win- neural HIV infection, and transmis- ters mild and the summers temperate . sible spongiform encephalopathies . A place where people don’t lock their or TSE diseases. houses or even bother to roll up their Retroviral immunology has been car windows, much less install The Club a 25-year interest of Chesebro’s. The .... A place where you can find park- Friend vims, which is in the same ing after 9:30 a.m. and you don’t even family of vimses as HIV, causes fatal need a sticker or a hanger. Now imag- leukemia in a high percentage of sus- ine that, in this paradise, you also get all ceptible strains of mice. Remarkably, the perks of being an intramural scien- other strains be- tist—the chance come infected but to do excellent re- “cure” their own search with good leukemia. “We support services know more about and bright, ener- a protective re- getic colleagues. sponse to this vi- It’s not a day- rus than to any dream; it’s the other retrovims,” Rocky Mountain Chesebro says. Laboratories. Celia Hooper He is closing in RML, a Hamil- from two direc- ton, Montana, out- Above the Mouta}ia Lab: the Bitterroots tions on under- post of NIAID, standing effective celebrated that cago and determined that the ailment immune response institute’s 50th an- was being spread by infected wood to Friend by at- niversary this ticks. State and federal public health tempting to de- summer. Tlje NIH officials, working out of a shack in the velop a vaccine Catalyst used this area, launched prevention and control MOUNTAIN WOOD TICK and by attempt- THE ROCKY as an excuse to pandora's box continued on page 6 ing to clone the visit the place and Rfv-3 gene on find out, if you CONTENTS mouse chromo- John Moore {circa 1955) will pardon the 1 5 some 15 that appears to confer the pun, what makes it tick. The Last Best Place Solid Start for effective immune response. Ulti- As RML scientist-emeritus Willy NIH Foundation Rocky Mountain mately, Chesebro expects, there will Burgdorfer (who discovered Borrelia Research Catalytic Reactions be three essential components: cor- burgdorferi, the spirochete that causes rect responses in CD8+ cells and Lyme disease) tells it, the facility that 2 11 Art Levine; Hot Methods: CD4+ cells and in humoral antibody would eventually become RML owes its Festival and Farewell Come-hither CVs production. origins to a mysterious western Montana For his work on HIV-dementia, outbreak at the turn of the century of 3 12 New NIDDK Lab Recently Tenured Chesebro collaborates with col- what was called black measles or spot- leagues at the Department of Neu- ted fever. As dozens of settlers and pio- 4 15 rology at Johns Hopkins University neers moving through the Bitterroot Val- Mentoring Roundtable Gazette/Cartoon School of Medicine in Baltimore, ley perished, Howard Taylor Ricketts was Poster Day: The coiitimied on page 8 SG 16 summoned from the University of Chi- Surprises Students Catalytic Questions — — From the Deputy Director for Intramural Research: Guest Editorial It’s as Good as It Gets: Very Personal Reflections on NIH and Its Research Festival he Twelfth Annual NIH Research Festival arrives Natcher Building, making it easy to move between talks with all due pomp and circumstance—on October and workshops but forcing a cutback in the number of T 6-9. As chairman of this year’s festival, I have the workshops and posters—although we were still offered opportunity to continue what has become a wonderfully an amount and diversity of science that one could barely satisfying and still evolving tradition. However, this Re- metabolize. That year also, we began to involve NIH’s search Festival will have a bittersweet flavor for me per- growing library of “special interest groups” in festival sonally, as I shall be leaving NIH immediately after the organizing. In 1996, to celebrate the Tenth Research Fes- festival to become senior vice chancellor for the health tival, we revived Abner Notkins’ notion of inviting NIH’s sciences and dean of the School of Medicine at the Uni- most senior scientists—including several institute and versity of Pittsburgh. After 31 years at NIH, I cannot imag- scientific directors—to present posters. Despite the vast ine a better way to say hail and farewell to this great resources available to this august group, their posters institution than by celebrating its intramural science. while .scintillating, perhaps, scientifically—tended to lack The Research Festival has changed over the years, in the aesthetic of their younger but more Mac-proficient both style and content. My good friend Abner Notkins, colleagues. That year, too, after years of tolerating the then NIDR scientific director, proposed the idea to the September rains, and with a science-based consult (Poor Board of Scientific Directors in 1986. Abner now recalls Richard's Almanac), we moved the festival to early Oc- that back then, “We had 15 very separate, self-contained, tober; and last year, obeying Poor Richard and remem- and often isolated institutes. More than a little of the bering not to schedule the festival on Yom Kippur, we very good work going on in the different institutes was were rewarded by sunshine. Last year saw the birth of a similar or even overlapping, especially at the basic level, Postdoctoral Job Fair, am by the Office of Education, but investigators often had no sense of this common bringing together job-hunting postdocs and representa- ground because scientists in the various institutes simply tives of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. didn't have much contact with one another.” In addition, I have again fine-tuned the formula for this year’s fes- Notkins felt that the breadth and depth of excellent in- tival (the program is available at: <http://silk.nih.gov/ tramural science offered the critical ma,ss needed for a siIk/fest90/>): a more leisurely three-day format, a re- rich and robust scientific meeting—a true celebration of vival of picnics and concerts, a tighter focus of the work- our work. At least some of Notkins’ colleagues were shops (now called “mini-symposia”) to cutting-edge top- dubious about the likely success of such a meeting, or ics, and morning plenaries that should have very wide even territorial about their science, and many felt that appeal. The now all-day Job Fair is slated for Tuesday, just the usual listing of lab and branch seminars on the October 6. The festival itself begins 'Wednesday with a Yellow Sheet was sufficient for scientific exchange. For- plenary symposium on Tl^e Origins ofLife, featuring NIH tunately, Ed Rail, then the deputy director for intramural Director Harold 'Varmus and NASA Director Dan Goldin. research, thought that the festival idea was worth a try. I believe this will be one of the most exciting scientific The first year, Abner organized a one-day festival and se.ssions ever held at our festivals ( talks on astrobiology, decided to turn the usual protocol for scientific meetings planetary origins and prebiotic life, and the earliest events on its ear. Instead of having the “supenstars” present the both in prokaryotic and eukaryotic evolution). plenary symposia, and postdocs their posters, he asked The Thursday plenary symposium offers a nontradi- Rail to invite NIH's most prominent senior scientists to tional view of translational research: bedside-to-bench, present the po,sters. Thus, it was midcareer and even rather than the more customary bench-to-bedside. The younger scientists who headlined the morning program, last morning symposium is devoted to a subject now with plenary symposia on topics that at the time were at pursued aggressively in virtually ever)' institute: Apoptosis. the cutting edge: Prospects in Ge>ie Therapy and Mini-symposia on cross-cutting topics of interest to both Oncogenes and Growth Factors. Notkins recalls one Nobel basic and clinical researchers fill the mornings and poster laureate staiggling to a,ssemble his poster—something .sessions the afternoons. The latest lab equipment is on he'd never done before or, at lea.st, not for decades! The display throughout Thursday and Friday. The challenge festival's afternoon featured 20 workshops, with a gala will be to choose from the engaging menu of competing picnic concluding “Research Day” in the evening. Hardly sessions, including, for example, “Cell Biology of the the typical federal event! Nucleus” (chaired by Mary Dasso and John Hanover), I chaired the second NIH Research Festival. Still just “Molecular, Cellular, and Tissue Imaging” (Peter Basser one day, this one included plenary symposia on Signal and Carolyn .Smith), “HIV Biology: Bridging the Gap Transduction. Gene Structure and Expression, and the Between In Vitro and In Vivo" (Edward Berger and Le- Molecular and Cellular Biology of the Nervous System. onid Margolis), and "The Molecular and Cellular Biology Again, we made time for a picnic and even a jazz con- of Diabetes Mellitus” (Abner Notkins and Phillip Gorden). cert in the evening. Getting from one event to the next 1 hope you enjoy this thoroughly groaning board, filled proved daunting, given that the workshops were so with the fruits of our best basic and clinical science.